Chapter 1—
Introduction
The island of Delos is a very small place. Despite its location more or less in the center of the Kyklades, it would probably have figured even less in history than neighboring Gyaros, that "worthless" island incapable of paying even 150 drachmas tribute in the days of Augustus (Strabo 10.5.3 = C485), but for one extraordinary circumstance: it had been the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. The presence of a sanctuary and its centrality in the Aegean attracted the attention of outsiders from the lonians and Naxians in the Archaic age to the Athenians, who controlled the island as a whole or just the sanctuary for much of the fifth and fourth centuries. When the Delians controlled their own sanctuary between 314 and 167 B.C . (the years of independence), they imposed an administration that recorded the business of the temple in scrupulous detail in a series of inscriptions that came to light in excavations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
These inscriptions provided a wealth of economic data, which was quickly subjected to analysis. Over fifty years have now passed since the last systematic treatment.[1] In the meantime, much has changed. New readings and joins have added further data to those available in 1938 and rendered some obsolete. Systematic study of Delian society has greatly expanded our understanding of the world that created these documents. New excavation has brought to light some evidence for the independent city. Exploration of the Delian countryside has revealed private farms in a landscape long thought to have been composed exclusively of estates owned by Apollo. These advances have created a new context in which to place the economic data Delos provides; the time is long past for a reconsideration.
[1] That of Larsen.
Perhaps even more important, the theoretical framework within which the Delian data were interpreted has changed radically. In 1938, when J. A. O. Larsen published his synoptic study of the Delian economy, our understanding of the Hellenistic economy generally, and of the information Delos offered, was structured by the views of scholars like Gustave Glotz, Fritz Heichelheim, Johannes Hasebroeck, and Michael Rostovtzeff.[2] Broadly speaking, and ignoring very real and very significant differences of detail and emphasis, they saw the economy of the Hellenistic world as a unity in which a universal price-setting market determined prices for staples like grain and oil all over the Greek world from Sicily to Afghanistan. This was a world where "demand for Greek goods of special types was large, the buying capacity of the market was continually increasing," and "the successful efforts of the Hellenistic kings to intensify production . . . [led to] a steady fall of prices in the Aegean Sea."[3] A vast network of traders tied this world together, enabling the price-setting market, while cities concentrated on the production of "industrial" goods for a long-distance export market and a kind of quasi-capitalism flourished. This view perhaps reached its apex with the interpretation of Aristotle Karl Polanyi advanced in his posthumous The Livelihood of Man.[4]
Needless to say, this view has come under serious criticism in recent years. Probably the most important sustained attack flowed from the pen of M. I. Finley, who argued eloquently in The Ancient Economy for a "primitivist" view that emphasized nonmarket exchange, the predominance of subsistence farming, and the universal economic goal of self-suffciency (whether in an
[2] Gustav Glotz, Journal des Savants 11 (1913): 16–29, and ibid., 206–15, 251–60; id., REG 29 (1916): 281–325; id., REG 45 (1932): 241–49; Heichelheim, Wirt Schw., passim. Johannes Hasebroek, Trade and Politics in Ancient Greece, tr. L. M. Fraser and D. C. MacGregor (London, 1933), vi, although see the curiously contradictory remark at viii. Rostovtzeff, passim.
[3] Michael Rostovtzeff, AHR 41 (1935–36) 235, 239–40, which summarizes the views subsequently elaborated in Rostovtzeff, 1026–1312.
[4] Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man, ed. Harry W. Pearson (New York, 1977), 238–51.
acter and significance of ancient economic activity, but no new orthodoxy has yet emerged.[5]
The time seems ripe for a reexamination of the data from Delos. This book is thus intended as a contribution to the continuing debate about the character of the ancient economy and a corrective to some of the problems I see in that debate.
General Considerations
Let me begin with the theoretical and methodological assumptions that underlie this project. I do not pretend to be "objective" in the debate about the ancient economy. In my view, it is a mistake to regard "the ancient economy" as a unity, as have scholars like Finley. The ancient world supported a variety of economies, which changed over time. Regional differences, which have only begun to be explored, were extremely important. Explanations for ancient economic phenomena must, I believe, be sought first in their local context. Local political and social circumstances must be canvassed to account for an economic phenomenon before the historian looks outside the immediate region. Not surprisingly, Delos was in its own way both unique and typical. It must be seen in the Kykladic context within which it was embedded, and in that context it and its immediate neighbors formed a relatively closed world (see chapters 2–3). Delos was unique in being a very small island (only about 6 km2 ) with pan-Hellenic importance because of its temple; its "insularity" also had an important impact on the character of its economy (chapter 5). Delos's long history of domination by outsiders distorted the typical relations between the wealthy and their exploitation of the island's economic resources (chapter 6) and in part prevented the development of a full local set of suppliers for some essential goods (chapter 5). The economic changes of the years of Delian independence can thus not be understood independently of their local political and social context.
Peasant farmers constituted the vast majority of the ancient population. For most of their needs—food, clothing, shelter—they depended on their own labor and that of their closest relatives and neighbors. While they certainly needed local markets to buy goods they could not produce them-
[5] Lutz Neesen, MBAH 4.1 (1985): 49–66; H. W. Pleket, MBAH 3.1 (1984): 3–36; see also the essays in Opus 5 (1986). L. de Ligt, MBAH 9.2 (1990): 24–56, 10.1 (1991): 33–77; Edmund Burke, TAPA 122 (1992): 199–226; Isager-Skydsgaard, 199–202; Dominic Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-CenturyA.D. Egypt: The Heroninos Archive and the Appianus Estate (Cambridge, 1991).
selves, like iron plows and large fired pottery, to sell excess produce, and to buy necessities during shortages, they lived largely independent of any large-or even small-scale trade networks. Like institutional peasants, cities too strove to live off the production of their own agricultural hinterlands, their
In principle, then, and as a model of the economy of Delos and its Kykladic neighbors, I have preferred local explanations for local phenomena. They do not require appeal to a great unified Greek or Mediterranean market. They are sensitive to local variation in geography, climate, and social and political attitudes. Only when local explanations for economic phenomena cannot be found should one search outside the immediate vicinity. For my purposes, the immediate neighborhood of Delos is the Kyklades, which include southern Euboia, whose cities (and especially Karystos, understandably given its location) had long-standing ties with Apollo's birthplace. The next step outward reaches the wider Aegean basin, and here we shall deal especially with the three poles of travel through the Kyklades: Athens, the coast of Asia Minor (including islands like Khios), and Rhodos. Beyond lay Egypt, the northern Aegean, Byzantion, the Black Sea, and the Levant. It is in that order that I seek explanations for the economic phenomena I examine here.
My exploration of Delian economic phenomena depends in part on a statistical approach (see chapters 5 and 6). I am reluctant to call it "cliometrics," although certainly this work falls, in some sense, into the body
of cliometric studies of antiquity that have been popular in recent years. Finley has warned in no uncertain terms against the "current number fetishism," by which ancient historians "are beginning to claim quantitative proof where the evidence does not warrant it, or to misjudge the implications that may legitimately be drawn from their figures."[6] Finley's emphasis on the absence of "ancient statistics," by which he meant "a series . . . available [as] a check on the impression of directionless variations (or of stability),"[7] has issued in such bald statements as "to have produced statistics, properly so called, ancient authors would have had to assemble, classify, and tabulate numerical data in a systematic fashion. . . . Such material does not appear in antiquity."[8] This of course ignores a whole body of epigraphical evidence, as Finley himself recognized. He recommended "a shift in the still predominant concentration of research from individual, usually isolated documents to those that can be subjected to analysis collectively, and where possible over time; an emancipation from the magnetism of the words in an individual text in favour of a quasi- (or even pseudo-) statistical study," and pointed to two examples of bodies of documents that could receive "cliometric" analysis, the Athenian horoi he himself had studied, and the accounts of L. Caecilius Iucundus of Pompeii. He added, tellingly: "Of course groups of documents that also have genuine contents can be more productive, but they are few in number and surprisingly neglected as groups. . . . The neglect has become nothing short of a scandal in the case of the documentation from the two great temple-centres, Delos and Delphi; one need only contrast the dismal scholarly record of the past half-century with the enormously promising previous half-century in both cases."[9]
And indeed the Delian documents provide the kind of time-series for which Finley urged "quasi- (or even pseudo-) statistical study," and that pursuit forms the heart of my work. The statistics I have used, mostly straight-line regression analysis,[10] are not especially complicated or sophisticated, but they seem best suited to the relatively simple, straightforward, and lacunose data we have. I have limited statistical treatment to data that
[6] M. I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, 1985), 25, and generally 17–34.
[7] M. I. Finley, Ancient History: Evidence and Models (New York, 1985), 27–46, quotation at 45.
[8] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton, 1992), 27.
[9] Finley, Ancient History, 44, 45. The nuances of Finley's views are largely ignored in the negative assessment of "cliometrics" in C. R. Whittaker, "La Cliometria e lo storico," Opus 5 (1986): 127–32.
[10] See Appendix II.
are substantial enough to support it; thus there is no general statistical analysis of grain prices in chapter 4 because the data points are few and scattered. Nor have I subjected the monthly prices of individual years for pigs, olive oil, and firewood to statistical investigation. On the other hand, I have sometimes presented very thin data in statistical form when the results are especially interesting from the point of view of economic activity and of modeling: the relation between prices for olive oil and barley and rents for sacred estates offers a good example.
The virtue of the statistical analyses lies exactly in their ability to grasp the data as a whole and permit a check on "directionless variations." It then becomes possible to answer, however tentatively, questions about change in economic activity over time: Did prices and rents rise, fall, or remain stable? Did the prices of different goods move in tandem or independently? Were there connections between commodity prices and land rents From the answers to these and similar questions, we can move on to treat the development and change of the Delian economy over time, and to try— however hesitantly—to offer explanations for change over time, and to test theories that earlier scholars had propounded. This eminently historical enquiry would be impossible without the statistical analysis that lies behind it.
At the same time, we must be fully conscious of the limitations of such a pursuit. As noted more fully in chapter 5, vast realms of Delian economic activity must be left aside because the inscriptions do not provide suitable data. Most disappointing is the practically complete absence of any real data for wages, despite literally thousands of payments to workers. Because the inscriptions rarely treated the city, we are generally ignorant about non-temple finances, occupations, and private trade. On the other hand, nonstatistical analysis has produced some striking results, particularly Claude Vial's evocation of the place and status of landowners and renters and her important claim, on the basis of careful prosopographical study, that a good many loans on Delos were intended for productive ends: the very opposite of Finley's own conclusion about the Athenian horoi.[11] In part because of its method, my work has a limited purpose—the exploration of certain aspects of the economic history of independent Delos—and is envisioned as a contribution to ongoing study, argument, and revision. I hope I have shown that the data, limited and recalcitrant as they may be, can yield considerably more than they have yet been asked to, and that the economic
[11] Vial, 317–38, 375–83. M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500–200B.C . (New Brunswick, N.J., 1951).
history of the sacred island was more complicated, but more limited in its implications, than has been thought.
Matters of Detail
In the rest of this introductory chapter, I briefly discuss, first, the character of the epigraphic evidence, the duties of the hieropoioi who administered the temple, and the publication of the data. There follow treatments of some important preliminary economic questions: the currencies in circulation on independent Delos and the relation of the prices recorded in the inscriptions to market prices. I end with a brief note on the Delian calendar.
The Character of the Evidence
Although some Delian inscriptions had been discovered before 1872, the real wealth of finds began only with the onset of French excavations. Many of the temple accounts—as well as decrees, treaties, and other documents—first saw print in a series of articles in the Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique or in monographs by Théophile Homolle, Felix Durrbach, and others.[12] A corpus of the Delian inscriptions was planned as volume 11 of Inscriptiones Graecae, but World War I intervened and postwar tensions prevented further cooperation.[13] The accounts are thus divided between two series, both edited by Felix Durrbach:
Inscriptiones Graecae XI 2 (Berlin, 1912), which contains nos. 135–289; and
Inscriptions de Délos: Comptes des Hiéropes(nos. 290–371) (Paris, 1926); and Inscriptions de Délos: Comptes des Hiéropes (nos. 372–498),Lois ou règlements, contrats d'entreprises et devis (nos. 499–509) (Paris, 1929),
to which must be added important new readings and restorations offered over the years by Gustave Glotz, Maurice Lacroix, J. H. Kent, Jacques Tréheux, and others.[14]
The accounts were the responsibility of the hieropoioi, the chief administrators of the Temple of Apollo during the years of independence. The magistracy was annual; a full panel consisted of four members, but the Delians often had to do with only two, and sometimes just one. Their duties touched on every aspect of the administration of the temple's business.
[12] For full details, see the lemmata in IG XI 2 and ID.
[13] See the rather cryptic remarks of Felix Durrbach in ID (1929), p. vii.
[14] See Appendices III and IV.
They oversaw the rental of sacred estates and houses and the collection of rent; hired and paid laborers; granted loans to individuals from the temple funds; disbursed payments to contractors (whose work, however, was supervised by special boards of
The accounts give, in a fairly straightforward fashion, income and outgo of the temple during the hieropoioi's year in office. For the most part the information is simply listed in categories, which include the total amount of cash received from their predecessors; collections in the form of loans and rents; outlays by month for ritual and other purposes; outlays for the maintenance, repair, and construction of temple buildings; and the total amount of money passed on to their successors. The reverse sides of the stones generally carry inventories, ordered by the treasury in which the goods were stored. Additional (late) payments are often recorded on the narrow sides.[16]
The annual publication of prices was not intended as economic data; like most ancient accounting, it kept officials honest and provided records that anyone who wanted to challenge the officials could review.[17] This is perfectly clear from the layout of the data on the stelai themselves. The order-
[15] Vial, 111–12, 151–54, 156–58, 216–32. Slaves purchased at ID 290.113–15.
[16] Good examples include IG XI 2.199 and 287 and ID 442.
[17] On the probable absence of a power of euthynai in the Delian logistai, see Vial, 161. IG XI 2.203A62 records pay for a heliastic court that heard a case brought against Euboulos, hieropoios in 273 B.C . (see IG XI 2.199B98). The case brought against the contractor Simon for unknown delinquencies may have rested on specifics of his contract; a number of these documents have been preserved (for the case, see IG XI 2.163Bg18, cf. 165.37; contracts at ID 500–502, 504–8). Cf. Finley, Ancient History, 32, on the purpose of documents. On ancient accounting in general, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, "Greek and Roman Accounting," in Studies in the History of Accounting, ed. A. C. Littleton and B. S. Yamey (London, 1956), 14–74, who, however, has nothing specific to say about Delos (31 n. 10). Richard H. Macve, "Some Glosses on Ste. Croix's 'Greek and Roman Accounting,'" in Crux: Essays in Greek History Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, ed. P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (London, 1985), 233–64, adds nothing of substance. For a good overview, see now Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-CenturyA.D. Egypt, 331–35, 369–87.
ing follows category of income or outlay: rents from estates, rents from houses, payments from the farmers of concessions (like the ferry to Mykonos or Rheneia), interest payments, defaults, expenditures by month, expenditures ordered by the boule (such as for special purification sacrifices), payments to contractors, and so on. It is easy to check whether the hieropoioi collected someone's loan payment, or whether the payment to the contractors building the theater was made with approval of the architect and board of overseers; but to check, say, pig prices over the year required a laborious search through an undifferentiated mass of monthly data, as well as review of other sections (like that for payments ordered by the boule, or the accounts of festivals like the Posideia) where payments for pigs might be recorded. The hieropoioi clearly had no intent to facilitate collection and comparison of time-series of data, and the fact that this is possible is only an accidental consequence of the real reasons so much detail was committed to stone.[18]
As a result many of the data from Delos, as abundant as they may be, are useless for economic analysis. There are hundreds of instances of payments to unskilled laborers for cleaning, carrying roof tiles, hauling building stone, or transporting wood, but only very rarely do the hieropoioi tell us enough to compare any two such payments. Generalizations about the "level of wages" or attempts to reconstruct a budget or cost of living from such data are very hazardous.[19] Likewise, the lack of figures for quantity bought for some goods (such as charcoal and rope) and the absence of any descriptive information (weight, length, cost of manufacture) for other items (such as rakes) render the abundant recorded prices useless.[20]
These inherent limitations have determined the kinds of data I have been able to work with. In every case, prices must be accompanied by enough information to be sure we are dealing with the same good or object
[18] That the Athenian administrators abandoned the Delians' practice after 167 and published only summary accounts proves the point.
[19] Because the data are almost never comparable—that is, we have no idea how long a job took, exactly what work was involved, and sometimes not even how many workers divided the pay—studies of Delian wages offer far less than they appear to: cf. Glotz, Journal des Savants 11 (1913): 206–215, 251–60; Larsen, 408–14. W. W. Tarn, in The Hellenistic Age (Cambridge, 1923), 115–27, founders in a mass of circular argument (p. 121: skilled workers at Delos "practically always get two drachmae" per day; p. 124: "a lump sum of 140 drachmae, which at the usual two drachmae a day means 70 days' work") and unsubstantiated assumptions (such as that workers received their entire annual income from temple employment). Budgets at Larsen, 408–14.
[20] Gustave Glotz, REG 45 (1932): 241–49, is too sanguine about the usefulness of some of these data.
over time. In practice, these requirements have meant confining my investigation to wheat and barley, olive oil, firewood, and pigs; the agricultural estates owned by Apollo, identified by name, and inventoried every ten years; and the buildings also owned by the god and identified by name.
Prices As Market Prices
The nature of the accounts leads directly to an important question: are the prices recorded in the accounts market prices—that is to say, prices any purchaser would have to pay? If the temple could command special discounts, or make special contractual arrangements with sellers, then the prices it paid would have correspondingly limited value in a reconstruction of price history; indeed, they might be grossly misleading. An example of the kind of distorting effect the temple might have on market prices appears in its relations with two smiths.
In 281 the temple paid the smiths Dexios and Herakleides an obol per piece to sharpen tools for a total of 47 dr 5 ob. For the year 279 B.C ., the temple contracted with Dexios alone to sharpen tools for a flat price of 40 dr. The temple therefore secured a 17 percent discount, assuming that Dexios sharpened the same number of tools in 279 as in 281 B.C . A few years later the temple returned to a piece-rate arrangement. This time Dexios accepted half an obol per piece, which suggests that a decline in the market rate for sharpening had triggered a resumption of the older, and now cheaper, arrangement.[21]
Fortunately, for the three commodities we shall deal with, there is clear evidence against discounts. Pigs were not bought "on contract." Three pigs acquired in three different months in 301 B.C . were supplied by three different men, although the price was always the same. In 269 B.C . no fewer than seven suppliers vied to sell pigs; none appears more than twice.[22] The temple was also unable to command discounts for bulk purchases of oliveoil. Enormous quantities were bought for athletic games in tandem with the regular small purchases of a few khoes for the use of the hieropoioi. The purchases show no indication of a discount for quantity; instead, the price paid per khous seems to follow the prevailing pattern in prices for that year. The prices for 250 B.C . are especially revealing, since the hieropoioi paid more per khous for the 81 khoes of oil for the games than for forty times less oil bought for themselves (table 1.1). Here it is clear that the temple could not—or would not—command quantity discounts.
[21] IG XI 2.159A58, 161A107–8, and 199A87 with Glotz, Journal des Savants 11 (1913): 255–56. Glotz thinks the temple cleverly forced down prices through the expedient of a temporary contract.
[22] See under the appropriate years in Appendix III, S.V.Pigs."
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Finally, wood bought by the temple after sometime between 250 and 220 B.C . must have been offered at the same price as to any other customer. A law passed by 220 B.C . to regulate the trade in wood and wood products forbade sellers to offer their wares for a higher or lower price than they had declared on import to the Delian harbor officials known as the
The accounts may preserve one clear instance of keen and open competition among suppliers. In 250 B.C . suppliers of raw barley the temple bought as feed for the holy geese jockeyed rapidly and vigorously with one another for Apollo's trade, apparently under conditions of continuously declining prices (table 1.2).
The evidence favors the hypothesis that the hieropoioi bought commodities for temple use on the open market at fair market prices.
[23] ID 509.9–10 (= SJG 975; Epigraphica, vol. 1, Texts on the Economic History of the Greek World, Textes Minores 31, ed. H. W. Pleket [Leiden 1964], 1.10.9–10). I use Pleket's date. Cf. chapter 5, pp. 173–5, below, for more detailed discussion of this law, where I argue that the law did distort the market for wood products.
Currencies
Like many Hellenistic cities, Delos issued its own coinage. Finds have been sparse, and until Tony Hackens's promised full study appears, we must rely on a few brief synopses.[24] Like the other Kyklades, Delos coined on the Rhodian standard, which was considerably lighter than the Athenian standard that Alexander the Great and his successors—except Ptolemaios I and the Attalids—adopted. Despite domination by the Ptolemies in the first half of the third century, the islanders never struck on the Ptolemaic standard.[25] Coins of the island for the third century are very rare, and silver practically unknown; the collection of the Staatliche Münzsammlung in Munich, for instance, contains only three rather poor bronze specimens
The other Kyklades coined as well. From Tenos, Paros, Andros, Naxos, Keos, and Syros come silver tetra-, di-, or single drachmas. Many date to the 230s or 220s B.C ., although the fine Syrian coins are second century. The islands also issued bronzes, and from Keos are known a series of federal bronzes associated with the third-century federation of loulis, Karthaia, and Koresia.[26]
These coins and others circulated on Delos, sometimes ending up immobilized and unspendable in the coffers of the temple.[27] Indeed, the existence of these issues sometimes posed problems. In the 190s, when a delegation from the newly reformed Island League was sent to Delos to buy grain, the Tenian currency they carried was not acceptable to the grain dealers, and only the unexpected intervention of a Rhodian banker who was willing to exchange the money without charging an agio (a fee for changing currencies) saved the day.[28] The hieropoioi solved the accounting problem that this swirl of currencies posed by converting all payments into
[24] Tony Hackens in Philippe Bruneau et al., L'llot de la maison des comédiens (Paris, 1970), 387–419, and his remarks in GD , 105–11. For Delian moneyers, see ID 461Aa76, with Vial, 186 n. 139, 245 with n. 295. Cf. also Jacques Tréheux, BCH 109 (1985): 489 n. 15, contra Adalberto Giovannini, Rome et la circulation monétaire en Grèce au II siècle avant J.-C., (Basel, 1978), 52, with n. 96 there.
[25] Introduction in Will I 175–79, with citation of recent discussions.
[26] See provisionally G. Reger, AJA 91 (1987): 272; Etienne, 197–200, 225–38.
[27] See Tony Hackens's studies cited in n. 24 above; Louis Robert, Etudes de numismatique grecque (Paris, 1951), 143–78; J. R. Jones, ANS Museum Notes 17 (1971) 127–36, and John R. Melville-Jones, University of London Institute of Classical Studies Bulletin 21 (1974): 55–74.
[28] IG XII 5.817. See Bogaert, 49, 176–78.
Athenian standard equivalents.[29] Their administrative decision eliminates for us any concern about varying values of individual currencies one against the other, which would have affected prices of imported goods, but it does leave unanswered nagging doubts that price variations, even in standard currency, may hide variations in the value of the currencies in which sale and purchase were taking place. However, as long as any such variation was not unidirectional—that is to say, inflationary—it may be assumed to have reflected real economic changes in the relative values of goods. I shall show below in chapter 7 that there was no general inflation on Delos between 314 and 167 B.C .
A Note on the Delian Calendar
There is nothing very unusual about the Delian calendar (table 1. 3) and the order of the months is assured (see, for example, IG XI 2.287A41–81).[30] Like all ancient calendars, the Delian required occasional adjustment to
[29] See Hackens in GD , 107–11. Athenian equivalent at, e.g., IG XI 2.161A4–5.
[30] Brief accounts of the Delian calendar in Alan E., Samuel, Greek and Roman Chronology: Calendars and Years in Classical Antiquity (Munich, 1972), 99–101, and E. J. Bickerman, Chronology of the Ancient World, (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 20.
bring it into line with the seasons. The new year began on the first new moon after the winter solstice. Special sacrifices were made then to Apollo, Artemis, and other deities.[31] To keep the beginning of Lenaion, as reckoned by their calendar, in coordination with the appearance of the first new moon, the Delians had from time to time to insert an intercalary month that followed Panemos and was called "intercalary Panemos."[32] The procedure was probably required about every four years, as in IG XI 2.162A47 of 278 B.C . and 199A, 274 B.C.[33] As a result, in any given year, a Delian month might correspond roughly to either of two of our months: Lenaion, for example, might fall in December or January. I give these equivalences in table 1.3 and use them throughout, but it should be kept in mind that they are approximate, and that the exact equivalence of any given month in any given year is impossible to determine from the data in the inscriptions.
[31] IG XI 2.154All, with Bruneau, 92; 269.15; 287A42. Imprecisely in Jacques Tréheux, Etudes d'archéologie classique 5 (1976) 88 n. 20 "I'année délienne commencait aux alentours du solstice d'hiver."
[33] But not exactly every four years: ID 290 (cf. 1. 79) of 246 B.C . was intercalary, but 250 B.C. was not (IG XI 2. 287A61, 65). Bruneau, 11, gives equivalences a month later than those in table 1.3, but they cannot be right; he has evidently not considered the way in which the Delian calendar would tend to shift dates. His various studies of the calendar of festivals (Bruneau, 86–93, 523–25, 559–64) do not help answer questions about the calendar itself. I want to acknowledge my debt here to Hartmut Beister, who helped me through the complexities of ancient calendars, and Ken Sacks, who first drew my attention to the problems inherent in Greek calendar systems.